Huawei Sets Sights On Virtualisation Market

Huawei is turning its attention to desktop virtualisation and network function virtualisation as it attempts to improve its standing in the virtualisation marketplace, according to the company’s CTO.

Ron Raffensperger states that the Chinese multinational networking and telecommunications specialist is keen to build on its reputation in the virtualisation space, which was recognised when the firm was named as this year's only new entrant to Gartner's Magic Quadrant for x86 virtualisation. Speaking to The Register, Raffensperger said the virtualisation trend is being fuelled by companies’ desires to move away from PCs and towards lower cost devices.

Huawei's cloud suite is called FusionSphere and it is based on the open source Xen hypervisor. Raffensperger said Huawei has modified FusionSphere extensively to make it more secure, scalable and reliable, thereby making it an ideal platform for those looking to take advantage of virtualisation.

Raffensperger said Huawei is now also in the business of selling server virtualisation to anyone, anytime, and can put resources in the places its partners want to take FusionSphere to market. Furthermore, with half an eye on the hybrid cloud market, he told The Register that the company is contemplating software that would see “a distributed cloud data centre where you have the ability to move workloads between multiple physical data centres that look like a logical data centres”.

Raffensperger concluded: “As we looked at the enterprise businesses, we decided we do not want to be just pushing boxes. There's a need for virtualisation in a lot of the markets where we have opportunities.”